The Crimean Khanate was often treated as a semi-nomadic, watered-down version of the Golden Horde, or yet another vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. This book revises these views by exploring the Khanate’s political and legal systems, which combined well organized and well developed institutions, which were rooted in different traditions (Golden Horde, Islamic and Ottoman). Drawing on a wide range of sources, including the Crimean court registers from the reign of Murad Giray (1678-1683), the book examines the role of the khan, members of his council and other officials in the Crimean political and judicial systems as well as the practice of the Crimean sharia court during the reign of Murad Giray.

The history of the Black Sea may be considered as alternating between an “inner lake,” when a single empire establishes control over the sea and its surrounding areas, and that of an open sea, in which various continental or maritime powers compete for the region’s resources. By taking into account the impact both of major powers and minor political actors, this volume proposes a long-term perspective of regional history. It offers a deep understanding of the political and commercial history of the Black Sea between the 14th and the 16th centuries, and provides insights into the political and economic developments of the region.

The fifty years between 1680-1730 were one of the most fascinating in the history of Europe and in Ottoman history. A period of coalitions and wars, climate changes, and natural disasters took place. This previously unpublished chronicle contains valuable information in various fields. It was written in Semi-Biblical Hebrew by a Jewish rabbi residing in the Crimean Peninsula, and includes insights on the political upheavals in the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman capital; the wars between the Ottomans, Habsburgs, Venetians, Circassians, Sefevids, and the Russians, which he vividly describes; Persia and the Caucasus; the fate of Jewish communities; epidemics and weather; and weapons and customs. The book, a historical mine that reads like a sweeping thriller, is now available in English for the first time.

For centuries, people moved between the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Europe, and Iran. This book studies the biographies of individuals and groups as different as rulers and revolutionaries, frontier bandits and merchants, soldiers and slaves from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Following their journeys across borders, the case studies of this volume emphasize the profound effect that mobility had on the lives and thoughtworlds of everyone with a Transottoman trajectory. The chapters reveal breaks, adjustments, and continuities in people’s biographies and the in-betweenness that moving typically created.

Slaves and Slave Agency in the Ottoman Empire offers a new contribution to slavery studies relating to the Ottoman Empire. Given the fact that the classical binary of 'slavery' and 'freedom' derives from the transatlantic experience, this volume presents an alternative approach by examining the strong asymmetric relationships of dependency documented in the Ottoman Empire. A closer look at the Ottoman social order discloses manifold and ambiguous conditions involving enslavement practices, rather than a single universal pattern. The authors examine various forms of enslavement and dependency with a particular focus on agency, i. e. the room for maneuver, which the enslaved could secure for themselves, or else the available options for action in situations of extreme individual or group dependencies.

Tributaries and Peripheries of the Ottoman Empire offers thirteen studies on the relationship between Ottoman tributaries with each other in the imperial framework, as well as with neighboring border provinces of the empire’s core territories from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.

Slavery in the Black Sea Region, c.900–1900 explores the Black Sea region as an encounter zone of cultures, legal regimes, religions, and enslavement practices. The topics discussed in the chapters include Byzantine slavery, late medieval slave trade patterns, slavery in Christian societies, Tatar and cossack raids, the position of Circassians in the slave trade, and comparisons with the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. This volume aims to stimulate a broader discussion on the patterns of unfreedom in the Black Sea area and to draw attention to the importance of this region in the broader debates on global slavery. Contributors are: Viorel Achim, Michel Balard, Hannah Barker, Andrzej Gliwa, Colin Heywood, Sergei Pavlovich Karpov, Mikhail Kizilov, Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, Maryna Kravets, Natalia Królikowska-Jedlińska, Sandra Origone, Victor Ostapchuk, Daphne Penna, Felicia Roșu, and Ehud R. Toledano.